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zac-warsteiner
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Parks and Recreation: Pawnee Rangers (2011)
One of the very worst episodes.
This garbage episode displays the worst qualities of three of the characters and no actual pushback from anyone else. Amy Poehler's character does worse than the fictional males she whines about and gets rewarded. Ansari and whatever "Rhetta" is create a stupid catch-phrase and act only slightly more foppish than they always do. Offerman's character is forced to sit back and watch his efforts and rare pleasure be destroyed by selfishness and is then tossed a cheap knock-off like an old bone. On the plus side, Lowe's and O'heir's characters are bonding and for once poor Jerry isn't crapped on as is the usual. Jones' character is uncharacteristically crapped on, perhaps taking Jerry's role for the episode. Plaza's character was there and nothing else, and Pratt's character was literally only used to help Poehler's destruction of the show's version of the Boy Scouts. This episode was awful.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Sarek (1990)
Finally, a good episode.
Vulcan alzheimers is nothing to gloss over, and the show does an excellent job with the disease, the fallout, and an excellent (if temporary) treatment. If only more episodes dealt with flaws in such manner, rather than abandon all logic in order to put forth a shallow, lazy short story. The arguments and fights shown were all excellent as well, with some refreshing violence to break up the monotony inherent in the mythos.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Tin Man (1990)
Standard weak Trek work
Mildly obnoxious overacting, one-shots brought in to make one par, and thus low-quality, episode of a television program. Standard stuff for this crew of writers. Only thing missing from standard efforts is an overzealous progressive bent. On the plus side some pointlessly evil Romulans die.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Offspring (1990)
Yet another triumph of feels over substance
In selfishly deciding to just begin the process of mass-producing artificial life forms, Data goes insanely out of character. Picard is used to try to remind Data of what a terrible idea unilaterally acting in this manner is. However, after the fact. Of course, all this is supposed to be ignored and instead focus on how sweet and wonderful anything at all can now be considered a child, and love conquers all. Even tho' Data exists to explain he does not feel love. Finally, of course, the bad ol' evil military man shows up to ruin everything. Except the inevitable business as usual reset at the end, making all of it pointless. Except of course Data's growth that doesn't actually happen until First Contact. This episode is all hugs and NO brains.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Yesterday's Enterprise (1990)
Pointless, except to bring back Denise Crosby after her movie career failed.
The acting was well done. The story was nonsensical, there were an incredible amount of moronic errors throughout and the hack forced drama of the suddenly OP Klingons and Romulans are irritating. On the plus side, nobody easily hacked into the Enterprise and beat up the entire security division.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: The High Ground (1990)
Yet another lame social commentary failure.
Once again, garbage writers do a terrible job attempting to 'teach' the lesser people about enlightenment. A shallow, heavy-handed reactionary tale of terrorists and how their cowardice and evil is somehow justified because of vague claims of injustice and victimhood. And yet again, the writers fail to convey anything better than low-IQ individuals can lap up. See reviews extolling the virtues of Ireland's failure to free itself and PLO ruining property values by existing.
Further, the unintended effect of YET ANOTHER failure of Starfleet Security proves how completely worthless they are. Not to mention how insane it is that every single sapient in the universe knows every single system on the Enterprise by rote. Seriously, this series is embarrassing.
On the pro-side, at least the head terrorist, incorrectly called charismatic by said low-IQ individuals, gets what's coming to him. He's literally murdering his own people and picking a fight he would NEVER win, just to link this awful story to Star Trek. Fail on every level.
Archer: Archer Vice: Southbound and Down (2014)
Awful
Too much stupid Pam's stupid babbling stupid nonsense. Too many idiotic hackneyed "jokes". Too much character stupidity for lazy humor. The show started badly and has just gotten worse and worse.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
Not great, not bad.
The film has a good build up of tension that doesn't really pan out. The ending felt like the director ran out of time and couldn't come up with the ending he needed another half-hour for. Too many loose ends and the suddenness of the finish left me annoyed more than anything else. Other than that, Brian Cox is excellent in everything he does. The rest of the cast doesn't matter, although Emile Hirsch does a fair job of keeping up with him. At least until they get into the left- off bits of story in the last third of the movie. Then he sort of drifts off into facial drama that doesn't quite work. Staring off into space dramatically isn't enough to make a character, in my opinion.
Considering the lack of explanation for what actually happens, I can't really rate the actual scares. For all we know, the entire movie was a hallucination due to fumes from the body. That's a more clear explanation than what's offered. The too vague Salem possible plot point wasn't even correctly referenced, as the actual events had young girls accusing older women, not the young girls themselves being accused. As that is too easy a matter to have corrected, I find myself believing the director left it in that way simply to confuse the viewer, which, again, annoys me personally.
Cinematography is great, sound is great, overall mood and dialogue are both affected by Brian Cox. Any less discerning viewer would do well to spend a night on this feature.
Frontière(s) (2007)
Derivative, at best.
I've just watched this movie for the first time, never even having gotten any research, but having seen it extremely inexpensive on Amazon.com. Watching it, I see why.
The movie begins with a pedestrian and half-hearted attempt at displaying a distopian society where one must use violence to escape. Apparently. You'd have to be extremely charitable and/or a torture porn fanboy to say you really believe that was pulled off, of course. After that, you get some still half-hearted drama from the principles that really only explains why the society is so crappy. After that is an extremely tedious drawn-out attempt to build tension. I can give enough credit to say at least this much wasn't half-hearted. Can't say that's necessarily a good thing, tho'. It takes forever plus a week to get to the hammer dropping on the thoroughly unlikeable principles. Finally it starts to happen, revealing the antags have been harvesting the population for far too long. Unexpected evidence of how bad society has gotten in the movie that nobody can keep track of all these un-investigated disappearances.
After a host of chasing and some fair special effects the movie throws in an obtuse story hook about nazi eugenics that only serves to make viewers wonder what the crap this is. The principles are easily picked off because they crumble instantly and have a total lack of intelligence and survivability. The movie continues along this vein, disgusting lack of ability on the part of the principles and some half- hearted displays of 'compassion' on the parts of the antags.
The movie ends up with a single principle twitching and screaming her way thru a host of just-plain-lame deaths of the antags one by one. The cannibal behaviour hinted at is barely touched on and something about some deformed and/or retarded 'monster' children is equally skipped over. And suddenly, well relatively suddenly, what with the tedious and by now constant twitching and screaming last protag; the movie ends.
I give three stars charitably, as the special effects were acceptable, for what you get to see, and the potential the movie had.
The Punisher (2004)
Yet another remake that shouldn't have been...
This movie spoiled before it came out on DVD, but this review might help a little.
I'm actually still in the process of watching this shamefully repugnant crapfest spewed out by the so-called director Jonathan Hensleigh, who should stick to writing, as he doesn't suck quite so badly at that. The movie itself didn't need to be made, especially in that the timing was WAY off, and therefore couldn't capitalize on the waning popularity of the hero.
The Punisher is the half-assed story of a man whose family is slaughtered by the clichéd all black clothing wearing henchmen of a half-assed criminal who tries to emote too much, has trouble keeping his half-assed criminal 'empire' under control when the slightest hitch occurs, and whose half-assed genes seem to skip generations. The half-assed hero goes from being a half-assed supposed super-cop in a pathetically contrived half-assed 'sting operation', to a (finally not half-assed) loser who can't protect a single member of his apparently blind family (Really, who can't see a group of all black wearing gunmen wandering slowly towards you? Were they all blind-drunk?), to a (back to being half-assed) super-vigilante with all the tactical skill and equipment to handle anything except a giant Russian guy, and of course keeping any single member of his entire extended family alive. The rest of the story is just co-stars trying to keep the movie from being a total failure, and an admittedly excellent study on what happens when somebody gets to run a movie into the ground because somebody else didn't keep him on a leash. None of this is spoiler material as the half-assed plot would have been obvious to a dead extended family.
On the plus side, you get to see John Pinette lip sync himself some opera and constantly be cooking. Almost a stand-up bit come to life. And I honestly despise having to do it, but I must admit some of the (still contrived) plans/methods Castle 'comes up with' were novel enough for your uncultured fanboy. Bleh. Now I feel dirty.
The Last Airbender (2010)
For a non-toon watcher...
As the Summary says, I haven't watched the series. Never really interested me, when it came out for Nickelodeon, I figured another 'toon for retarded 6-year-olds and didn't bother even glancing at it. I will allow that apparently the 'toon is better than that.
But this means that in watching the film I have nothing to base it off of. Can't say how awful it is compared to anything. Except getting your head caught in a wood-chipper. In which case, the wood-chipper would have made me feel less annoyed afterward. The movie consists of 103 minutes of people almost crying, including me, by the time the credits come. I think even some of the credits were about ready to cry as they scrolled up. That's all I can come away with. Every single character in the movie looked like they were going to cry in two seconds, except the evil leader, who looked like he needed a toilet. I don't know if that counts as a spoiler, but it seems he never found one.
Delving into the technical makeup of movie never interested me either, so the music existed and the special effects are no longer what drive movie creation, unless the director just goes bonkers, ala Dances With Smurfs. The storyline was incomplete, which is dangerous, given that you may flop before you can get your trilogy out, and then look even more stupid than you would have with at least one complete movie. And given that some of the people on Earth haven't watched the 'toon, the storyline becomes that much more important. The Avatar is supposed to enforce balance between the elements, even tho' he/she/it is born to one of them. That doesn't make sense, nor does enforcement if the Avatar's not supposed to hurt anyone. The job consists of flying all around the world 24/7 putting up walls of elements until everyone gives up and goes home?
So we end up with a very long episode of 'Tai Chi Tonight', and everyone's gotten a lot of practice at looking like they're going to cry. I suppose that could be something said for the actors. They managed to act. Like they're going to cry. Actually, the General managed to have some ability to act, and he didn't have to perform a kata for an hour to use an ability. So there, one good point to the movie. That and it wasn't 2+ hours of wishing you were in a wood-chipper. Other than that, stick to the 'toon, or just do what I've been doing until tonight when I made a mistake. Stay away from Shyamalan's movies.